How it can be used as a Mentor Text
- Table of contents to find the part you are interested in reading about/ also a way of organizing your writing
- Captions on pictures
- Starts with a vingette (short story reader can relate to) to make a connection to his writing life (pg 5)
- Introduction- reason wrote book and what can be expected
- Non-fiction that includes emotions (“my heart sank”, “I wanted to cry.”- pg 8)
- Compares lost manuscript to “his lost child”- personification- pg 8
- Reasons for parenthesis
- Reasons for quotation marks other than dialogue (“War”- pg10)
- Different types of punctuation ( – : ; )
- Comma in a series
- Use of italics (ick- pg 12)
- Compares his 17 year old brother to an unfinished manuscript full of potential (powerful)- pg 12
- Writes from childhood experiences
- Combination of photos, text excerpts, pics of his own notebook, map- why did author choose for each page?
- Uses a writer’s notebook and discusses how and why…what’s in there (pg 23-29)
- Takes reader through process of drafting (pg 36-38)
- Use of bold print
- Use of Q & A (interview and open-ended questions that lead to answers)
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